Clean Plate Club

Just after the sun came up one recent Sunday, a group of people assembled on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue. They were cooks. Several had chef’s jackets rolled up under their arms like sleeping bags. They were about to be escorted into the United Nations to prepare a “working lunch” for forty world leaders. Except for the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for John Kerry, the leaders were Presidents. A lunch with so many Presidents was an exceptional event. So, too, was the menu. It was garbage. It was made with ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away.

“These people, these world leaders, are used to eating for pleasure,” one of the meal’s organizers, Sam Kass, said. Until last year, Kass was the Obama family’s private chef, and he has been involved in the White House’s policies on nutrition. “They eat caviar and foie gras. I’m now seeing how badly this could go wrong. ‘What is this disgusting food?’ Hollande might say.”

François Hollande, the French President, was important because, in December, he will host a conference in Paris on climate change. The purpose of the working lunch was to prepare for that conference, and the guests tended to be big countries sympathetic to the cause or island nations that are expected to sink below the sea. Kass had an idea that a lunch of this kind might put food on the climate-change agenda: “People don’t understand greenhouse-gas emission. But they understand food.”

Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill, was the other organizer. Barber is tall and very skinny, and has hair like steel wool which, not unlike his thoughts, won’t be controlled. He has a degree in English and began cooking to buy time to write a novel. The cooks who had gathered on the corner were Barber’s staff and would be not only making the lunch but also serving it. (“They’re the only people who could possibly explain the dishes,” he said.) Last spring, Barber ran a pop-up operation using only ingredients discarded by the food industry, and has shown an aptitude for making good food out of landfill. “It is all going to come down to the veggie burger,” he said. It was the main event and was principally pulp from vegetables after they were juiced.

At the lunch, the bread, made from barley mash from a local brewery, was followed by a salad. “We don’t want it to look pretty,” Barber told his chefs. “These vegetable scraps come from Baldor. You see their trucks all over town, delivering to restaurants. This is the stuff left over. Baldor has tons.” He smeared a green dressing on the side of a wooden bowl. “This is the landing pad. You pile the salad on top.” “Landing pad,” in kitchen vernacular, means something like an anchor: it keeps food from sliding off a serving dish. The fries (made with a cattle feed known as “cow corn”) were served on a landing pad of ketchup made from discarded beet bits.

A man with a badge rushed in. “John Kerry is allergic to celery,” he said.

“Oh, shit,” Kass said.

“Adam!” Barber called out. “Can we make a new salad?” Adam Kaye is Barber’s longtime sous-chef. “And Adam. There’s celery in the veggie burger.”

“I’ll make him a chicken,” Kaye said. (It turns out that Kerry merely dislikes celery.)

Meanwhile, cooks were lining up to enter the dining room, holding bread on wooden planks. Cooks are not servers, and one of them was visibly shaking even before David Barber, Dan’s brother and business partner, called out in panic, “Hey, look at how the bread moves around!” The bread didn’t have a landing pad.

Kass is a doer, an action man, who conveys the feeling that, as long as you have the right friends and give them a good meal, anything is possible. “Has there ever been a lunch with more riding on it?” he said.

The veggie burger headed out to the dining room. “The burger is it,” Kass said, tensely.

Dan Barber was upbeat. “That burger might be good enough to put my daughter through college,” he said.

Some minutes later, Kass and Barber stood by the dishwasher, watching the plates come back. Many had a lot of food left on them. Nearly half the salads weren’t finished. Many of the burgers were untouched. Barber blamed the bun. “It’s the gluten thing,” he said. “It’s killer.” Kass, trying to be upbeat, noted that two people had ignored the bun and eaten the burger.

Barber asked a server, “And Hollande?”

“He ate it.”

“Really?”

“Hmm. Half. But he ate all of his dessert.” ♦

Bill Buford’s next book is “Dirt (Five Years in the Ancient Kitchens of Lyon, Where My Children Became Frenchies and I Trained to be a Chef),” which will be published in September. A former fiction editor at The New Yorker, he is also the author of “Among the Thugs” and “Heat.”